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The Synology End Game

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131–140 of 360 posts

Re: The Synology End Game

#131

Post by plqbfbv »

exmadscientist wrote: post #98

A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it . I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out over SMB for years now. It doesn't need to do anything more and I don't need to think about it. A lot of the alternatives being proposed are not so easy to maintain. A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. And I don't have (and…

So much this. I left another comment that touched on this.

I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months.

I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it.

Synology still scores very high on this single metric.

Re: The Synology End Game

#132

Post by Sebb767 »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #92
M95D wrote: post #50

But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog: There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, no video, no audio, lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports. Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB r…

SATA? In 2025? NVMe all the way.

If you need a lot of (not so fast) storage, 3,5" drives are still by far the best TB per €. For a lot of NAS solutions (backups, video/movie/music storage etc.) their performance is completely fine.

Plus, we're most likely talking about Gigabit networking here, so unless your workload consists of very parallel random access, this is going to be the limiting factor anyway.

Re: The Synology End Game

#133

Post by ffsm8 »

tecleandor wrote: post #48

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

You regret switching them from Synology to Trueness? Am I misunderstanding your final note?

It's confusing me after the preceding displeasure wrt Synology

Re: The Synology End Game

#134

Post by Paul_S »

Paul_S wrote: post #127
martijn_himself wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in starting out like this, I have a bunch of 2.5" SSD's I'm not using- do you have any tips on what cube to get? Are you concerned about power usage at all especially if this is always on?

Any of those cube gaming ones I think are great. I got a dual chamber one which makes shuffling drives and cabling easy. Can't remember the name but it was 90 pounds, way more than I paid for the old 4U, although inflation from the 90s probably means it was more expensive in real terms. Most of the power is used to spin rust so not sure it's worth worrying about the HW power use, just use whatever old pc you can get…

Found the name: Fractal node 804.

Re: The Synology End Game

#135

Post by noisy_boy »

For someone very comfortable with desktop Linux and NAS curious without much hardware skills, are there any good guides to get started? I use a HDD enclosure with two 2TB disks shoved in but the content availability is dependent on my laptop being on. I would rather have JellyFin running on my NAS/media server so that we can watch stuff on TV even when the laptop is off. Would be good to be able to access the network file system over NFS using WiFi to avoid being tethered to the desk.

Re: The Synology End Game

#136

Post by folkrav »

atlasduo wrote: post #30
codeflo wrote: post #12

The year is 2025. Delivering a good product is not considered profitable enough anymore. If a company or product is beloved by customers then that means it doesn't squeeze them to the max. This is clearly money left on the table that someone will sooner or later extract. High-end brands are not exempt from this.

Easily explained: when times are tough, delivering growth naturally is hard. Squeezing the customer is the lowest hanging fruit. Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on…

I guess times have been tough for a long damn while then…

Re: The Synology End Game

#137

Post by poulpy123 »

noisy_boy wrote: post #135

For someone very comfortable with desktop Linux and NAS curious without much hardware skills, are there any good guides to get started? I use a HDD enclosure with two 2TB disks shoved in but the content availability is dependent on my laptop being on. I would rather have JellyFin running on my NAS/media server so that we can watch stuff on TV even when the laptop is off. Would be good to be able to access the network…

Since you're comfortable with linux, you really don't need a tutorial. Just buy a cheap minipc or maybe a raspberry if you fancy it, install the distribution of your choice or something more complete like OMV7, plug your enclosure and you're done

Re: The Synology End Game

#138

Post by dvdkon »

M95D wrote: post #50

But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog: There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, no video, no audio, lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports. Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB r…

That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no?

The closest thing available now would probably be a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, a motherboard with a Rockchip SoC and two M.2 slots, into which you could put their six-port SATA cards. No idea what that whole setup will draw, though.

EDIT: I have to complain about the article you linked. It's certainly true that one should account for power consumption, not just purchase cost, but some crucial mistakes make the article more harmful on the whole.

The author cites 84 W power consumption for an i5-4690, and 10 W for a J4125 CPU, but those figures are the TDP. For all we know, those CPUs could idle at around the same wattage, and from my experience they likely do.

Having done some measuring myself, I'd say the largest source of power draw in an idle NAS will be the PSU, motherboard, and disks. With any remotely recent Intel CPU, it idles so efficiently as to be negligible in a PC.

Re: The Synology End Game

#139

Post by 8fingerlouie »

tecleandor wrote: post #48

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

> Multichannel CIFS/SMB)

My DS918+ has multichannel SMB and possibly also parallel NFS. It only works if you have multiple NICs connected.

Other than that, i completely agree. Their tech stack is horribly outdated, and while i understand their reasoning for not upgrading, there's a limit to how long you can do that. Their reasoning is that they know the software that's currently running, warts and all, and can better guarantee stability across millions of devices with fewer moving parts.

Re: The Synology End Game

#140

Post by 8fingerlouie »

Shank wrote: post #72
tecleandor wrote: post #48

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

The encryption is also broken. If you use encrypted shared folders, you have an arbitrary filename limit ( https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/File_folder_path_... ). If you use volume encryption, your encryption key is stored on the NAS itself, which is capable of decrypting the data, unless you buy a second Synology NAS ( https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2023/06/volume-encryption-in-syno... ) to act as a key vault…

The filename limit comes from ecryptfs (https://www.ecryptfs.org/) which is what Synology uses for encrypted shared folders.

As for full disk encryption, you can select where to store the key, which may be on the NAS itself (rendering FDE more or less useless) or on a USB key or similar.

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